Pentaho and Rackspace partner to provide Hadoop as a Service

Business intelligence and analytics provider Pentaho has partnered with leading hosting and IaaS provider Rackspace to launch a new Hadoop as a Service offering for enterprises with a need for cloud-based big data capabilities.

The two companies have teamed up to introduce a service called Rackspace Big Data, which will see Pentaho’s data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) capabilities move to Rackspace’s public and private cloud environments, as well as dedicated managed servers.

“Pentaho is leading the innovation of Hadoop Integration and Analytics, and the upcoming cloud offering with Rackspace reduces the barriers to instant success with Hadoop, so customers can adopt and deploy quickly, delivering faster ROI,” Anderson said.

Rackspace is also partnering with a few other notable names in the Hadoop game in order to deliver the company’s new Big Data platform. Hortonworks will be providing the HortonWorks Data Platform, an enterprise-grade open source Hadoop distribution, while Karmasphere will be providing hadoop-based analytics.

Rackpace’s Hadoop as a Service model is not the first but it is notable for the breadth of the partnerships struck. The Hadoop as a Service / Big Data as a Service is a relatively new model but is expected to grow in popularity over the next few years due to the steep rise in demand for real time business analytics. The Hadoop market in 2012 is worth $1.5 billion and is expected to grow to about $13.9 billion by 2017 according to Markets and Markets research.

If anything the partnership is a big win for Pentaho. This is the company’s first strategic cloud partnership and it will help the company’s customers bridge their business analytics platform over to the cloud, while also allowing Rackspace a direct link to new big data production environments. The new service will offer enterprise customers scale-as-you-consume capability among other benefits Hadoop can offer, and it beckons a bigger question on whether other companies like Pentaho will follow suit and embrace a similar role at the intersection of cloud and big data.

Jonathan BrandonJonathan Brandon is editor of Business Cloud News where he covers anything and everything cloud. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathanbrandon.

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